I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government(beanlog.vercel.app) |
I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government(beanlog.vercel.app) |
Edit: I am wrong. You can only buy it two ways which is ridiculous in my view.
More to the point of the website that belongs in a museum, why can’t they update this consumer facing portal? What happened to all the people from “digitization” govt organizations? Such as 18F and usds. Oh. You mean all they do is replace the front end? Got it.
Personally, I didn't even know of this portal's existence until I signed up for an account and and went through the same process the author went through. I noted the same security theater and passed it over to my USDS team to see if there's anything we can do.
At first glance, simply replacing the front end is a solution, but there are bigger problems here that the author did not try. If one tries to change your bank account number, having typed in it wrong, they'll have to mail in a physical form to have it changed. As the author noted, going over $10k per year will also trigger unintended consequences that can span 8-10 weeks before the money is returned.
There are problems here that goes beyond just replacing the "front end".
But separately, it is a miracle that the author didn't hit the physical identity verification path [2] when signing up for the TreasuryDirect account.
[1] https://treasurydirect.gov/timeline.htm?src=td&med=banner&lo...
[2] https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/46840/treasury-dir...
You’ll be happy to know this site is in fact being redesigned per an article I read recently
:(
Regarding virtual keyboard, of course it would be better to use physical keys, but for reasons I don't understand they don't have a wide adoption that they deserve.
It’s unlikely that the author reads hacker news, and even if they do, they have said anything in this thread for you to respond to.
When you deal with an entity that has the monopoly on legitimate violence, your bargaining power is - unsurprisingly - borderline nonexistent.
The US isn’t quite yet there where they won’t let you go to court, so you could still try that
Beside that its a loan to the gov not the currency issuer which is the Federal Reserve Bank (In the US).
To qualify this, there is zero risk that the technical letter of the agreement won't be honoured.
Lending money to the US government is very high risk right now. Simple person metrics like debt to GDP indicate they're currently fighting a bigger war than WWII, and the trend-line says they are losing. If you lend the US government enough money to buy a sandwich there is a real risk that at the end of the agreement they'll return an amount of money that won't get you a sandwich.
It doesn't matter that they say "inflation protected" on the tin. Exactly what happens there is uncertain, it is quite likely that there will be games played with inflation figures. Or a simple haircut of how much money they owe ("we did owe you $100, now we owe you $75. Law says so.").
Can anybody elaborate on this? If I buy on Monday what’s the rate?
$10,000 individual purchase. Interest is added monthly but it does not compound, ever. After one year you have earned $712 in interest. However, if you sell at this time you must pay 3-months interest which amounts to $178. Your net gain for the year is $534 for an actual rate of 5.34%.
5.34% is pretty good for a guaranteed return, but it is significantly less than people are expecting.
...especially people such as OP who decided to seemingly purchase a Series I bond on a whim.
Hard to put that on anyone but the purchasers.
The Treasury is supposed to be a huge backbone of the world's economy and it doesn't look good imo to have software designed this badly for it.
Does not sound like an accident, but a clickbait instead.
De facto its happened at least once before when Nixon closed the gold window overnight.
It doesn't matter what the rules say right now, his wealth is at risk. They can and do change the rules sometimes. They can change what the word "inflation" means. Maybe someone legislates that inflation is 1% now for paying back I-bonds, I dunno. This is risk, it could happen. Something is going to happen, the debt situation is unprecedented bad. Will that something affect these bonds? It is possible.
We’ve all heard about shrink inflation by now. Theoretically that’s measurable by taking the Oz. into account.
But how about the drop in quality of goods? Raisin Bran with few raisins, cars with thinner door panels, etc. This is impossible to measure, obviously happens, and is systematic in one direction resulting in a lower reported inflation rate.
Moreover, what they're attempting to match isn't inflation, it's a specific government inflation metric which contains many corrections which make it obviously not match inflation for the purpose of preserving purchasing power.
For example, when inflation goes up the metric assumes that purchasing will shift from high value goods (like steak) to lower value goods (like rice), which causes the metric to read lower. This is no good if your goal is preserving purchasing power: you put in enough to buy steak and the inflation metric is okay with what comes out being only enough to buy a meal of rice (not technically, since steak and rice aren't the only goods but you get my point).
“metrics like debt to GDP indicate they're currently fighting a bigger war than WWII,”
Meaning that the GDP trends as if we’re in a WW3 situation and loosing, not that we are. I.E the GDP/debt metric appears to be as bad as if we were loosing a war when in fact we’re not even fighting one.
Ironically I disagree with both points. Yes the economy is bad, yes it will get worse but:
- I don't think the economy is as bad as losing a world war; the US has too many fundamentals in her favor (namely resources and a strong Navy to prevent outside threats).
- Ironically enough we are in fact loosing a low intensity world war, mostly fought in diplomatic relations with third world countries. Just like the first Cold War, but with weaker fundamentals on our side.
These bonds only match inflation as defined by the government via CPI. But there is a strong argument that real world inflation is significantly higher than CPI.
If the US government defaults on debt, then I bonds will be the least of our concerns. So this is sort of an “all eggs in a single basket” type situation as USG pays a zero risk premium.
"They're zero-risk bonds..."I'm guessing it will have a happy ending because there's a thinking human on the other side. This is government, not a private megacorp.
> but it is significantly less than people are expecting.
What people, and what expecting? I think OP new exactly what they were getting into.
Of course it _could_ happen - nothing prevents it. And if they did, they'd have destroyed the credibility that took over a hundred years to create, and it would remove any future possibility of people lending money to the US gov't. A rational actor would not undertake this action, unless there's some good reason (such as nuclear war).
[1] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/additional-resources/historical-chan...
It isn't a matter of credibility at this point, it is one of political realities. There hasn't been a plausible outcome where the debt principle gets paid back since the 1970s, but that turned out to be OK because they can keep rolling that over with new debt. Alright. Well now we're approaching debt levels where even paying back market interest rates is coming under pressure and probably going to give.
The risks here, much like the debt to GDP ratio, are starting to move off the charts. Lending the US government money can't possible be safe under these conditions. Someone here is obviously going to get screwed, some of these promises have to be broken. It could just as easily be these bonds as anything else.
As of today, Lumber is down 30% year on year. Those same people seem to no longer talk about lumber as it doesn’t suit the narrative.
It’s not a conspiracy in this case or an official narrative. Inflation is high so reporters try to find examples. Instead of lumber, they now talk about groceries or whatever.
Last year that commodity was lumber. A couple of months ago it was oil.
It’s quite possible, likely even, that your personal inflation doesn’t match the official inflation, because you don’t have the same basket of goods. By all means if you want to present an alternate inflation with different weighting that’s fine, preferably show what the same weighting’s were over the last 20 years though and be transparent about the weightings like official ones
Or do a YouTube video showing different amounts of lumber and yell about how the lame stream media is lying to you.
Europe has to find a way to buy Rubles quickly or choose between freezing or damaging capital goods (there are industries that cant be shut down because they get damaged).
There’s not enough American LNG to rescue Europe, and if there were there arent enough ports to import it. Anyway, nascent American populism will make sure Americans get (cheap) gas first.
Because the US government prints the dollar that the debt is denominated in, there is no risk that they would be unable to repay the debt, so it would have to be their explicit choice.
Technically the USA's elected congresspeople might be able to repeal or sidestep the 14th amendment and pass legislation causing the government to willingly default on their debt, but a move like that would likely cause a global financial panic and potentially even a collapse of the dollar itself, very quickly costing them many, many multiples of the amount of "money" saved. That's if the dollar is even still considered to be money at that point.
The government would start hemorrhaging money in the bond markets far before a bill like that could actually pass, due to investors pricing in the possibility of willful default. The first moment a congressperson even proposed it seriously in a tweet, the rates would be affected in a small but measurable way.
Even in a crazy hypothetical where the USA were entirely annexed by a foreign nation, it probably still wouldn't default on its debts, because the annexing country would want to preserve the asset of the USA's reputation for repayment.
So, what's the chance of the USA repealing the 14th amendment by a bipartisan 2/3 vote, then willingly choosing to surrender all of their power to other countries on the global stage? Like I said, the word "risk" starts to lose all meaning at that point. You're better off buying some books for entertainment, because you'll need to stay in your bunker for quite a while.
When you say "there's a non-zero chance that the US Government defaults", you might as well be saying "there's a non-zero chance that everyone comes to the sudden realization that money is dumb and we should stop using it".
No risk, no reward.
You've only addressed credit risk above. But come on, we all know there are all kinds of other risks at play here.
The only other risk I can think of is interest rate "risk" - the "risk" that rates go up right after you buy a bond, and you'll wish that you'd waited and gotten the better deal. But I wouldn't really consider that a true risk. The bond you bought is still perfectly good, so that's just plain old buyer's remorse.
Example: Two weeks ago I re-entered US as a citizen. Several people ahead of me smoothly went through the border control line. I was 'randomly' chosen for inspection by border patrol, an agent fabricated a story that a dog alerted, and I was forcibly strip searched where yet another agent fabricated he saw a 'plastic baggy' coming out of my ass. This 'evidence' was used to cuff and shackle me and drive me all over the state, while the government failed to find a doctor to anally probe me against my will. A warrant was even written by a crooked agent testifying this absolute bullshit. Government incompetence cost me 16 hours of my life, cuffed and shackled and mocked by doctors and agents publicly in waiting room of multiple hospitals. After two agents examined my feces to make sure there were no 'drugs' I was released, sans the discharge paperwork that was stolen from me and sans the affidavit of the testimony the agent wrote which he conveniently neglected to hand to me when he served me the warrant.
Will you end up like the guy in front of me, smoothly going through, or will you end up cuffed and shackled while agents try to get you anally probed. It's anybody's guess.
I even worked as for a few years for the gov, and the bureaucracy is even worse inside!
https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/the-need-to-rebuil...
Amusingly one of the “nicest” government arms to deal with is the IRS.
I get plenty of sunlight.
But Nixon’s gold window was the most egregious.
So if you start out by issuing an executive order requiring everyone to turn in their gold in exchange for certificates denominated in dollars and then a few months later you decide that those certificates and all other deposits are worth 70% less in gold then they were before it amounts to a systematic taking that looks like the worst violation of the Takings Clause ever. i.e. "Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation" (from the Fifth Amendment).
In theory states could do something similar under the taxing power, but Congress doesn't have the power under the Constitution to enact property taxes in any way that is practical. We have the 16th Amendment so they could do that in a practical way on incomes.
Congress just decided to jointly repossess 70% of the financial wealth of the country, and ignore every solemn representation they or anyone else had ever made to the contrary. It that is not unconstitutional it should be.
There were alternatives, they could for example have recapitalized the Federal Reserve system, with a debt for equity swap at the cost of wiping out the original shareholders, of course. The banks held title to a worthless enterprise and Congress sanctioned a massive levy of their depositors to keep them afloat.
"Justice McReynolds wrote the dissenting opinion. He protested that gold clauses were binding contracts, and that allowing the administration's policies to stand would permanently damage faith in the government to uphold its own contracts and those of private parties. McReynolds distinguished the cases at hand from the Legal Tender Cases, arguing that in the earlier cases the government sought to continue operating until it could meet its obligations, while the Roosevelt administration apparently sought to nullify them."
My favorite is telling a farmer his homegrown pig feed is illegal because it effects interstate commerce.
The one that best illustrates bad law with good intentions is the migratory birds act: protect wildlife -> good. Doing so by making international treaties supersede the constitution -> not good (that ruling has been cut back)
Liquidity risk.
Market risk.
Geopolitical risk.
To name a few.
You might get your money back. But that money might be worth shit due to inflation. It might be impossible to sell the bond due to a shortage of liquidity, etc, etc.
It's naive and basically wrong to characterise a bond as zero risk just because there is an (almost) zero percent chance you won't get your money back on maturity. This is merely _one_ risk.
------------------
'31. Even though prior searches resulted in no evidence of internal drug smuggling, the CBP Agents and Dr. Martinez continued the intrusion on ***’s body without her knowing, willful consent and without a warrant. Case 4:16-cv-00334-CKJ Document 1 Filed 06/08/16 Page 7 of 17
- 8 - 32. In fact, Dr. Martinez, a male physician, entered ***’s room and, after asking a few cursory questions, brutally invaded her body on a warrantless and unjustified search for contraband. 33. Dr. Martinez forcefully and digitally probed ***’s vagina and anus. 34. *** had never before been to a gynecologist and, for the remainder of her life, will always remember that her first pelvic and rectal exams were under the most inhumane circumstances imaginable to a U.S. citizen at a hospital on U.S. soil. 35. *** was shocked and humiliated by these exceedingly intrusive searches. That an audience of CBP Agents and Holy Cross staff observed her being probed compounded her feeling of degradation. 36. No drugs were found inside ***, who was then discharged from Holy Cross and transported, by CBP, back to the Port of Entry. 37. *** was released from custody without any charges at approximately 8:00 p.m., only after enduring roughly seven hours of dehumanizing, invasive and degrading searches. 38. Throughout the unreasonable searches of ***’s body cavities, she continually denied smuggling drugs internally and continually refused consent for each search. 39. At no point during the searches of *** did the CBP Agents obtain a warrant authorizing a search of her body
The searches conducted by the CBP Agents, Holy Cross and Dr. Martinez injured *** physically, mentally and emotionally. Her labia, vaginal opening, and anus were left raw and sore and she felt violated, demeaned and powerless as a result of the searches
----------
This has been going on for YEARS. That case was filed in 2016. I don't link the actual report here, which I have downloaded from PACER, but it names the patient specifically so I cannot include it here without doxxing. Using the case number you can find it in PACER yourself.
While I was at the hospital, one of the agents (CBPO 'Peterson' from Nogales Port of Entry) even joked to me he had recently done this to a trans man with a surgically placed penis. They accused the penis of being a drug smuggling apparatus and did this presumably to fuck with them for being trans. A SCBPO 'Sherry' from Nogales Port of Entry, the person in charge of taking me to the hospital, bragged to me about being paid $110/hr while working overtime taking people to the hospital on these searches, mentioning other innocent people who he had subjected and 'lamenting' the 'last guy' was detained for 3 whole days. His counterpart 'Peterson' bragged of buying a ~100k truck with the pay.
Canadians, Ive loved least despite having a best friend and close family.
I agree with Latin Americans, for what its worth. USA is “United States of America” not “United States, America”. But its a useless fight. In Spanish Ill be precise.
Even Brazil is in America. This is why I dislike using the term "American" when referring to US citizens, it's hopelessly ambiguous: are you talking about the country or the continent?
However, after a few years in Central America I’ve broken myself of this usage. Spanish has an adjective for US people (aside from gringo, etc.) that I can use in Spanish, and when speaking English I find some other phrase. Note also that for many people in South and Central America “America” is what US people call “the Americas”: one continent, not three.
United States doesn't have an adjective. Colombian would be nice, but its also taken and now problematic.
Even that can be confusing. United states could also refer to Mexico, which has the actual name "United Mexican States". Someone from Mexico can rightly call themselves from united states.
This guy has less than 20 grand to his name and he's investing in I-Bonds? That's the real tragedy.
That was the shocking bit for me too, although I suspect (hope?) the author has more money outside that bank account.
I wouldn't recommend anyone with only $20k invest it or at least not entirely. Sure they have (probably) the best risk-adjusted return right now but Savings I Bonds aren't a great emergency fund because of 12 month lockup and 3 month interest penalty for liquidation in the first 5 years.
Another time, I was using a public restroom and it contained a very large red button with a very large sign that read "ATTENTION DO NOT PUSH RED BUTTON UNLESS IT IS AN EMERGENCY"[1]. I did not push the button and my curiosity about remains unsatisfied.
Point is, just because the Federal government ordains that the limit on series I bonds is $10K purchased electronically plus $5K purchased with tax refund per tax ID[2] per calendar year, you shouldn't expect the web site itself to enforce this limit. There's all sorts of ways you can accidentally or intentionally exceed limits, sometimes systems will catch them, but sometimes not.
In prior years, you could even apparently get away with exceeding the limit with no more than a stern warning not to do it again[3].
I'm fairly confident OP misinterpreted the emails they got from Treasury Direct, and that the Treasury will refund the excess amount of the purchase, not full transaction amount. At this point, they own $10K in Series I bonds and will receive a refund for the excess $10K. I'm curious if they'll get the refund as a single transaction for $10K, or as two transactions of $25 and $9975.
[1]: https://imgur.com/jAKRPQt
[2]: You can use "Entity Accounts" to purchase additional bonds. https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/help/tdhelp/help_ug_292...
[3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/na13f/exce...
Obviously still better than regular bonds in this regard.
Munis are usually exempt from both but pay lower rates accordingly.
A GE MRI scanner had options in the software that could be on, or off. Rather than a check box you typed ‘1’ or ‘0’. This is relatively recently.
I tried for a while to find a field that would accept other values, and eventually found one. When the sequences ran it crashed the scanner and the patient had to be rebooked as the reboot takes a long time.
I don’t test on patients anymore.
With a fixed rate of 0% at the moment, the ibond is an "investment" which is guaranteed to lose real value because the 'gains' from the ibond are taxed so if the fixed rate is zero it will lose real value. It will also lose value due to systematic understatement of inflation e.g. due to the substitution correction-- but even if you believe that its inflation metric is fair the taxation makes it lose value.
Now-- if your investment plans direct you to hold something cash-like which ibonds withdraw delays are still good enough to satisfy, then okay sure, it does pay more than cash. But that's the right comparison. Ibonds are not, for example, a good alternative to buying a market index with a historical return of 10% after inflation.
I never want to see what their backend database looks like -- probably ROT0ing the passwords.
And now we have open banking which makes creating bank transfers like this trivial for the end user [disclaimer, I work for a leading open banking API company in the UK] and the right API can be just as easy as stripe to use
I guess it's in part helped that we were stuck with only a few old major banks until the last decade when the technology was ready for the new challenger banks to actually offer new interesting ideas. I think the US is stuck with thousands of smallish banks that somehow need to send cash between themselves.
I don’t think this is correct. They’re going to re-calculate the interest rate 6 months from May and it could be less than ~8.5%. So you’re really just guaranteed ~4.25% for half the year.
If you buy in May, you lock in the May rate for 6 months and then an unknown rate after that.
“We set the inflation rate every six months (on the first business day of May and on the first business day of November)”
So by buying in April, the next rate change on your own bond would be in October, which would still be before the next inflation rate change.
But anyway it staying inflation-linked is presumably what people buying it want? The more often it updates the better, could go up too.
There are blogs that explain it in detail.
Probably best to buy them in a fund due to their complexities. Vanguard and Fidelity both have funds for them.
* Passwords require a mix of upper/lower and special characters, however when entering your password on the ALL UPPERCASE VIRTUAL KEYBOARD, you're informed that they're not case-sensitive.
* Any use of the back button gets you to an error page, from which there is no way to get back to your account. You're now logged out.
It's as if whoever built the site never even tested it.
That's too little to be true money storage. It's not enough to buy any new car.
> ... deposited to your TreasuryDirect account by the IRS as a result of an IRS tax refund ...
The how-to:
https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/articles/res_i...
Anyone know when this became possible? I've been buying I-bonds for years and it's news to me. Paper bonds have been a hassle, all-online is a huge improvement.
what is the benefit of buying ibonds on April 30, 2022 at 7.12% gain versus buying on May 1, 2022 at 9.6% gain?
The bond rates are set per 6 month window - but you get it relative to the purchase date. So if you buy before the last possible day before the rate change date you would get 7.12% (annualized) for 6 months then 9.6% (annualized) for 6 months. If you buy after the rate change, you would get 9.6% (annualized) followed by some yet to be determined yield for 6 months.
It confused me for awhile until I figured out that different people with different investment dates will have different instantaneous interest rates as a function of their date of investment.
So buying now lets you take advantage of the similarly nice previously set rate, for 6 mos, then another guaranteed (and known) nice rate for another 6 mos.
If that was so it would make perfect sense that the third transaction to purchase $9975 would fail because you already purchased your limit in the second transaction. In that case user would expect 2 refunds 25 and 9975 NOT 10,000 and 9975.
Basically an ordinary HNer saw that article posted here about I-bonds, and like a typical HNer, probably thinks they're a lot smarter than they actually are, so they went and tried to buy a financial product they didn't fully understand, made a mess of it, and now blames the UI.
Edit: https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/indepth/ibonds...
Doesn't explain why may is too late.
I personally think this is an overblown concern given the absolute dollar amount is so tiny. We're talking about interest on $10K. It's just not that much, a few hundred dollars.
https://tipswatch.com/2022/04/24/lets-handicap-the-i-bonds-f...
Shoddy software like this undermines general trust in the government.
Of course I'd learn about this on May 1st
For a long time horizon, broad market index investments have reliably outperformed home prices.
It would be an interesting backtesting question: Imagine you have enough money for a down payment on a median priced home, consider two options: put the money into ibonds vs put the money into a market index. Then after X months, what percentage of the time is the investment still able to meet the downpayment requirements of a median priced home (at that time, which might be more or less than before)?
It's not guaranteed that the ibond option will be less volitile because what we're comparing is market vs home-market, so it might not even win out over short term. For really short windows the ibond interest clawback will hurt it too.
Since home prices have increased substantially faster than inflation the success rate of the ibond option will (assuming the future is like the past) tend to 0% success for longer time windows. Since market returns have outpaced housing costs, the market investment will tend to 100% on longer time windows.
Personally, I might well just go the market index route: Even if we presume the ibond success rate is better in a short window (I think that's a reasonable assumption), "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law" and the market index is the clear winner in the long term.
It would be sad to constantly be expecting to buy a house 1 year out, invest in underperforming investments, and as a result never be able to afford a house because they were always escaping your investment!
However, since the I bond term readjusts in 6 mo intervals, it's possible for CD rates to catch up in the next two years as interest rates rise.
So if there is anything 'golden' about the situation, it's the opportunity to (perhaps briefly) receive 80s-era guaranteed interest rates.
Can you imagine the people who bought i bonds in the 2000s when the fixed yield part of the return was 3.6%? Though they obviously had their ups and downs, but right now if they held on they are sitting on a year of 10%+ yields.
Bear in mind there are some other technicalities with i-bonds. They are all documented on the treasury direct website:
- you have to hold it for a minimum of 12 months
- there are two parts of the bond a fixed rate (currently 0%) which is set for the lifetime of the bond, and the variable rate which is tried to inflation
- if you hold it for less than 5 years when you withdraw there will be a 3mo interest penalty
- you're limited to 10k purchased per SSN, you can get over 10k if you get your tax refund in i-bonds.
Author admits they screwed up, decided to share the screwup, and who hasnt been trough that exact dunder blunder?
Fun short read 8/10.
People want to think it wouldn’t happen to them, so they go through all the reasons they would have been able to avoid the situation so that they don’t have to fear it happening to them.
People really don’t want to admit to themselves that there are a lot of things outside our control that can happen to us.
This post is a fantastic example of the poverty trap. We design laws that, on paper, help the poor; and then we blame them for not taking advantage.
When in reality, they are poorly implemented, poorly advertised, and confusing.
With a $10k cap, this program is clearly intended to help people with low assets. How many people with a net worth under, say, $20k in the US? Tens of millions! How many of those would've really loved the extra $850 to offset this year's record inflation? Basically all of them! How many of them found this obscure website with awful UX and received the money? Approximately none!
From reading comments here it sounds like the author both misinterpreted things and also compulsively over deposited to test the governments software.
Testing government systems as an outsider is a really bad idea.
It's boring, not even about the article, and barely accurate (only very few comments actually criticise the article's author), yet that's the first thing you read here.
I think it’s appropriate to say they made a stupid mistake and move on.
The author is likely a little frustrated so I can forgive their shade throwing at treasury.
Your pseudocode already failed the unit tests. The limit is 10k per year, and you can hold I bonds for 30 years. Someone can have 300k of I bonds in their account balance.
(Not that it would be hard to do it correctly.)
It’s 2022, not 1998.
I would expect a banking/payment UI to be very clear and foolproof.
Agreed, fun little article.
The author explicitly indicates that it is all of their savings:
> I sat there with my $173.12 of remaining savings and $25 in I-bonds, feeling like I had accomplished something truly remarkable.
I don't think this is generally worth it as a security measure, but the goal is not to protect against automation. Instead, custom on-screen keyboards are attempts to thwart keyloggers.
When I saw the email informing the author of the over-purchase, I knew there was no way out. Purchasing the difference, as the author did, would only cause more trouble. The questions now are how much will be refunded, whether any purchases will go through, and whether there will be a fine or legal action. Refer to the rule above for my guesses.
I think many people do not appreciate how devastating this is to public trust.
It looks to me like he was going to get the extra $25 returned to him and have 10k in bonds. It's definitely vague though.
(1) Purchase #1 for $25 successful --> reduce remaining limit from $10000 to $9975.
(2) Purchase #2 for $10000 rejected and refund pending --> DO NOT reduce limit since you know the purchase didn't go through.
(3) Purchase #3 for $9975 within limit --> allow purchase, reduce limit to exactly $0.
Instead, at step 2, the software seems to handle the purchase by unconditionally taking $10000 off the limit at purchase time and putting $10000 back later when the refund is processed. (And consequently, at step 3, it failed the purchase.)
There isn't an obvious reason to do it this way, so it's surprising. It seems like if you can reduce the limit, you can check if you've exceeded it and just fail the purchase and never modify the limit (at purchase or refund time).
It seems to be a weird mix of wall street cosplay and financial ineptitude.
At least that's how I feel here.
I suspect that's not what's going to happen though. OP will get a refund of $25 + $9,975.
This is a perfect HN post because it combines terrible technology and “let’s see how it breaks.” Thanks OP, a delightful Sunday read.
Well played, sir. Well played.
I tried to pay my parents' credit card balance (let's say it was $1000).
I went through the process and received an automated email saying, "Thank you for paying $1000 on the credit card."
Got a call from my father a few hours later telling me he spent another $300 and could I please pay the extra $300...?
So, I signed in again and paid another $300.
Only thing is, unbeknownst to me, the $300 payment canceled the $1000 payment -- because they both were scheduled for the same day.
I only found out when I signed in a few weeks later and saw a $40 interest charge for not paying the full balance on the credit card.
<grumble>...
Definitely my fault for not paying closer attention, but still annoying.
But lots of ways to "fix" bad software.
Also, the refunds for Cetes when you go over the limit take a few days, not 8 to 10 weeks.
Also, the US tax system is partially the result of lobbying by parties such as TurboTax [1].
I'm glad I live in NZ, another smaller country with great online systems for government interactions.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/taxes/turbotax-h-r-block-sp...
But with your last $10k? That's just stupid (or fiction)
Either create an LLC or a child. Both can have a tax identifier. Not sure which is cheaper in the long run but the child is definitely more fun.
Source: I have both a child and an I bond
Strip a few zeroes from there and I guess it's worth the funny anecdote, but these are serious amounts of money that the author just sent into the black hole of bureaucracy for shits and giggles.
I think if regular people used these transactions more we’d have more errors. But then I suppose the UX would get improved because we’d have millions of transactions instead of thousands.
As it is now people spend a lot of time and so bad UX can still be successful. I probably spent 20 minutes on the treasurydirect site and their purchase/transfer page as opposed to seconds on my consumer-designed bank page.
Sounds like he will have made his intended 10k investment, there's no indication the system doesn't work as intended (even though it could work a lot better, obviously - the app could check for the investment limit right away, and an 8-week window for refunds, in a system that offers 2-month investments, is borderline scammy).
At least that's what I view as the logically "correct" way to interpret the sentence. Whether it's what the software does or not is anyone's guess.
also, the 8-week window is indicative that this will be reviewed by a human being, who would hopefully understand the intention behind depositing 25 and then 10000 (the intention behind depositing another 10k might be a bit less clear lol).
"I purposefully tried to make a transaction that breaks the rules, it didn't end well."
E.g. I buy shares and mistype the ticker or buy extra. It processes but then I notice my mistake and I can either fix it by selling, or decide ir doesn't matter and keep the shares. What doesn't make any sense is the broker keeping the money for two months and not giving me any share.
I don't think this is a defense against bots. Virtual keyboards were created primarily as a defense against keyloggers, IMHO.
TLDR: this is indeed BS security theatre along the same lines of blocking password managers.
Your browser will probably remember your password afterwards, so the usability decrease isn't even that bad. And that's not a security flaw either, because hardware keyloggers don't see the autofill values.
I feel like the agencies should just let Visa or Mastercard handle billing and collection.
I went through the process 3 times and got an error each time. Eventually I gave up and decided I'd have to buy books in person the old-fashioned way. I'm pretty sure I got at least 2 sets of books delivered to me.
I had to arrange for a return, and customer service wasn't happy about it. These days, it's pretty obvious that an error on a web page doesn't conclusively mean a purchase didn't go through, but back then I don't think either they or I clearly understood that.
But good lord is that TreasuryDirect site the worst site on the Internet. Every single time - and I mean every single time - I instinctively click the back button to go back to a prior screen only to be presented with an error message and thrown out of my session, requiring another visit to the god-awful virtual keyboard and navigation through menu after menu of curiously similar, poorly-worded options. They can do better.
The caveat is that you must agree with how your govt. calculates inflation. Also, your personal expenses might not be well represented by official inflation. Finally, like any bond, if you sell them before they mature you might get smaller (or higher) returns.
Not saying this is a bad investment though, I just rarely see those risks discussed!
This is an easy caveat to make as there are many other parts depending on how the US government calculates inflation.
And there aren’t alternate inflation calculations out there, and certainly no consumer financial instruments pegged to them.
For all its flaws, it’s the best we have. I think it’s not discussed because it’s such a sunk risk that it’s not really anything that would change someone’s mind.
But there are. Institutions such as the IMF also have their own economic measurements.
There are several.
CPI-U, CPI-W: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/overview.htm
PCE deflators: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/categorie s/21
Surely this is to prevent keyloggers, no slowing down bots. With that said it is questionable if it is worth it. People would probably pick less secure password as a result.
It tried ordering new ink based on supply levels and apparently became upset with the supply chain delays so it kept trying to order as the ink remained low. (Of course, I didn’t recognize this for a while…)
Silly me, I had assumed someone would code a simple ‘check-if’ flag in the ‘order ink’ algorithm…
I know that US banking system is something else but this is preposterous.
Or just as simple as “everything has to settle before we send a check” so you can’t use the US Treasury as part of a check cashing scam.
If the first case delivering the smaller amount and refunding the overpayment would be what the customer would want. In the second case delivering nothing and refunding the entire payment would be what the customer would want.
I could see purchases of financial instruments fall into either group. It would depend on what alternate investments are available to the person. Say I've got $10k to invest and my first choice in investment #1. I try to purchase $10k of #1 and it turns out there is a limit of $5k. My second choice is investment #2 which has no limits.
In that case I'd want $5k in #1 and the other $5k in #2 and so the behavior I'd want from the seller of #1 when I try to buy $10k is to sell me $5k and refund my $5k overpayment.
But suppose #2 has a minimum investment of $6k, and I have no good #3. In this case what I might want is all $10k in #2. When my attempt to purchase $10k of #1 fails I'd want them to sell me nothing and refund all $10k so I can buy #2.
I don't know anything about money/finance. Can someone ELI5 to me if I can still get the free money from this, this year?
Commercial malware doesn't work this way. The term "keylogger" is a misnomer.
"Keylogging" without context provides an unintelligible stream of garbage that might have well be from a random number generator. Most malware that I've seen either directly target the browser or the operating system, but in both cases they're looking for an unencrypted HTTPS stream, that they can re-package, upload, and store. With the goal to sell batches of credentials for specific websites.
Many people have this unusual belief that a user's stream of keys would look like e.g. www.example.com(13)username(9)password(13). But that isn't how users typically interact with their browsers, MOST websites are accessed via a search engine or favorites/bookmarks, and users often won't use the keystrokes to navigate between input elements.
Again, CONTEXT is everything with "keylogging," since most of the value is generated from WHERE not just WHAT. "Targeted credential theft" is a better way to describe it since they're stealing structured HTTP form data, not raw keyboard input (and even if they were steaming keycode inputs, they'd likely still be using the browser's context to do so).
So, in my opinion, most malware wouldn't even be aware or need specific support to bypass this virtual keyboard "security" because by the very nature of them they aren't operating at this layer anyway.
I don't know about commercial malware, but at least in the 90s (which is when these kinds of on-screen keyboards started to appear), it was not unusual to find on a computer "infected" with malware a text file containing every key that was pressed since the malware was installed.
Yes, nowadays malware tends to be much smarter: also capturing an image of the area around the mouse pointer on every click (which is the reason some on-screen keyboards blank the keys when you click), only logging when the window has an specific title (which is the reason some online banking sites add lots of random spaces and punctuation to the window title), or even using lower-level code to hook into the browser and directly capture the form contents on submission (which is the reason several online banking sites require you to use invasive "anti-malware" plugins which attempt to prevent these kinds of hooks).
And yes, there is malware that collects unencrypted traffic, but that is _appreciably_ more complex to design and implement than simple keylogging. There's also malware which pulls credentials directly out of the web browser memory, although improved protections on cross-process memory access are making this much harder to do on real operating systems. Both of these are better methods, but they are harder and operating systems are intentionally implementing measure to defeat them. For mostly historic reasons straightforward keylogging remains easy and reliable on modern computers.
But it doesn't really refute the kind of snapshot-in-time voodoo that government websites tend to build out and then never change because if doing so were to cause a problem, then someone could get blamed. I've never seen such a UI contraption in the "private" sector of banking. Not that they don't have their own obtuse slow moving corporate bullshit like snake oil "2FA" with varying requirements, it's just less bad.
FWIW related to this topic does anyone know the details of how the IRS website just decides to spit out "Permission Denied" when trying to obtain an EIN? I think it's an Akamai? message, probably due to some user surveillance garbage, but haven't investigated further. Even coming from my own naive residential IP with surveillance-friendly Chromium I still got it. I figured I'd wait a few days and try again, but same thing. It worked fine from a vanilla iPhone on the cell connection, but unfortunately I ended up doing that too late and missed the window to lock in April's rate.
Couldn't you do that with a bookmarklet, so it would just take one click?
1. They don’t have network access by default. It’s not a simple confirmation screen to enable network access. You have to go into settings
2. Apps can explicitly disallow third party keyboards for password entry.
3. Keyboards run out of process from the app.
And yes, iOS has extensibility support for third party password managers.
> "A refund of the excess purchase..."
So they'd be refunded the excess, i.e. $25.
Putting another $9,975 through just feels like being "too smart".
Is there no way to purchase these bonds besides this website?
The problem is, giving financial advice en-masse is very expensive and risky for a company. You need to ask a lot of questions about the users situation (assets, debt, income, dependants, etc) to make an informed decision. If you give bad financial advice, your putting yourself at big legal risk. The language has to be very specific (aka hard to understand for normal humans). And often the advice comes out as rather un-opinionated and general, which for most people means it's hard to actually action and put in place. All in all, it's a big investment, big cost, stresses out your legal team - which means less companies choose to do it, which in turn make it less accessible.
The alternative camp is very clearly just choosing to give 0 advice. Just giving access to investment products, with a full hands off 'make your own choices man' approach. Think robinhood. This is where people make mistakes.
The weird thing is while legitimate companies are afraid of giving advice, anyone with a social media presence can get online and talk whatever smack they want, with very little worry of blowback. One of the biggest mistakes I see is somebody from one country (say AU) watching a youtuber talking about another country (say US) like it's a universal truth. Different financial systems have their own metas depending on government retirement schemes, importance of credit scores, mortgage systems etc. Most useful and practical advice is country specific.
Legislation has just fully failed to protect consumers from bad advice, by making the barrier to entry so high for legitimate companies looking to inform at scale that it's not financially viable - compared to just doing the hands off 'not our problem man' approach. They've also done nothing to stop people taking advice from randoms online (not that they really could). Unfortunately visiting a personalised financial advisor in the same way you'd visit a doctor, is just expensive and not an option for most.
I agree with this. It seems that I have to make all the choices myself to shield the company from any responsibility so why should I pay some fee for the advice? No wonders that people get advice from random videos on YouTube or any equivalent source.
Due to the increasing financialization of the economy, more and more people feel like they need to become wannabe speculators to protect their situations.
Thanks, Wall Street and Harvard Business School for fucking us all.
And fuck the Uniparty for squashing any real option to them.
Those times never existed for the vast majority of people. Minorities, single women, most men...... None of them had this rose colored past.
Statistically, more people now have more income in the US than ever before. Each income level is higher, some more than others (and this is a static snapshot, most people move around income quintiles throughout a career), options for goods are higher, items are safer (cars especially), and on and on.
The "life used to be so easy to make a good pay and have a great life" views are not backed by the evidence.
> Gone are the times when having a good job, paying a reasonable mortgage for a reasonably paid house, saving a reasonable amount for retirement, while keeping a reasonable amount for emergencies (rare, before lay-offs become the knee jerk reaction of MBAs fatten their bonuses).
Is there a word or half the sentence missing there? I cannot follow your meaning.
I feel like a lot of people just can't stand having money standing there doing nothing as an insurance policy when they could be making money or buying something with it.
Depending on the interest rates, and assuming they can keep the line of credit if they lose their job, this might make sense since it's a choice between reducing debt now vs potentially increasing debt later.
The second part is just silly, but it's probably the attitude they got them in debt in the first place.
And then, they pay more on their actual insurance policies to have low deductibles because they can’t afford a larger deductible because they don’t save anything.
Also the blog clearly indicates they were going to poke the fate bear, poked said bear, and then went surprised pikachu.
Is anybody else just sick to death of the term "emergency fund"? If you go to /r/personalfinance, every other comment is reminding people to stock up their emergency fund. Towelie says, "Don't forget to bring a towel!"
I'll tell you about my real "emergency fund": In an actual, living emergency, every single dollar I have, in every account, even my IRA, and all my credit lines combined, are my emergency fund. That's the nature of an emergency. If I empty out some specially earmarked emergency fund, I don't tell the doctor to quit taking the bullets out of my spleen because I'm tapped. "Sorry, can't touch my HYSA!" (HYSAs are another butt bug of /r/pf)
What people mean by "emergency fund" obviously is their "don't stupidly overdraft your checking account fund", but they never spell that out.
People keep voting for less government (meaning workers) but not less government (meaning scope of responsibility), so the remaining workers must handle larger workloads. That's never worked out well in any industry, and it's bizarre people think it would work any better in government.
The UK gov has its fair share of problems but gov.uk is great at explaining all their stupid rules.
South European governments are incredibly bad from my experience and from what my friends tell me, Germany, France and the Netherlands are fairly bad as well (in different ways). Maybe nordic countries fare better.
Russia used to be a bureaucracy nightmare but got much better in the last few years.
Otherwise you're effectively left as your own lawyer, having to know tricks of how to communicate/escalate and doing online research to find out. In general if you can get a government agency on the phone they can be quite helpful (their customer service hasn't been optimized away like private companies), but you still need to know what to ask for and how to work with their bureaucratic minds.
For example, for something like a car's title, you could probably apply for a duplicate title from the DMV and get another one sent. But for immigration problems I've got no idea.
For the title, I've known a person that had the issue. It was the duplicate that was lost again, not sure why they couldn't request another one, not sure if a lawyer would have helped. But the result was a wait time of 6 months (instead of the supposed 3-5 weeks)
Whatever agency was sending you your important document has to be the one to re-issue it and resend it. USPS has no role until it comes time to deliver it again.
The only difference is there are less opportunities for the bourgeois who are willing and able to pay to be on the other side of the velvet ropes
The US Government offers a special savings program called iBonds (not an apple product). Technically they’re referred to as Series I bonds.
These bonds are special. Each citizen can only purchase $10,000 per year. The thing that makes them special is that they have really favorable interest rates that are made up of two components. There’s a fixed component largely controlled by the Fed. Currently this is essential 0% though rates are rising. The second component is tied to inflation. Right now, that component is ~8% for the most recent issuance (there are two issuances per year of these bonds where they recalculate the interest rate). This rate may change if inflation goes up or down.
The bond is special because that 8% is really high compared to other risk free instruments. For example, compare that 8% to what you’re earning on your savings account. Hence why many people have taken interest in iBonds recently.
You can only purchase these instruments directly from the treasury department. Google Treasury Direct. Also there are rules about how long you have to hold them and how much interest you give up if you need to withdraw your money early. Those rules are outlined on Treasury Direct.
The rate tied to inflation is set every 6 months (May 1 and November 1), and when you buy a bond, the rate holds for 6 months. So if you bought on April 25, then in October you would get approximately 3.6% of the value of the bonds you bought, and the rate would reset to the current 6 month period, which is expected to be somewhere around 9% when they announce it soon.
You can cash in the bonds after either a year or 15 months (I don't remember for sure), but if you cash them in less than 5 years, you lose 3 months of interest. I'm guessing they don't give you money if you cancel when the rate is negative which can happen.
[1] https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/indepth/ibonds... under “Who May own an I Bond”
I mean, it's exactly 0%. https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/indepth/ibonds...
> The bond is special because that 8% is really high compared to other risk free instruments. For example, compare that 8% to what you’re earning on your savings account.
Some people might call that special high interest "free money."
You can still purchase I-Bonds, with the understanding that the May rate will be adjusted again in 6 months (it could go down if inflation goes down) and you won't be able to pull your funds for a minimum of one year.
It's a great option for inflation protection if you can let that money sit for awhile. https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/indepth/ibonds...
Arguably an i-bond would out preform anything in my portfolio based on the last six months.
As someone who has experience with savings bonds and Treasury Direct, I still have no clue how to interpret that phrase. Savings bonds are discrete things with discrete values, even though TD has worked to smooth over that quality with arbitrary purchase amounts and partial redemptions. "Excess purchase" may very well mean a refund of the entire singular $9,975 bond that was purchased.
The way to find out is to call TD or search around web forums, but it's understandable that OP reacted to one possible implication of the message rather than taking a few hours to find out what it means.
The website not stopping or warning you is one thing, though I think the real change needed here is on the backend: when executing the order it should check your limit before trying to transfer the money.
The way they're doing it is probably safer for them in terms of races or whatever, and who knows what ancient Treasury system it's probably interfacing with, but still.
Of course, a physical keylogger is a different beast, but really, if you got physical access enough to install an actual piece of hardware...
With I-bonds you don't need to speculate on whether the bond will default, but it does force you to speculate on what your financial situation will be over the next year.
> Cunningham's Law states "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."
That is "post anything online and someone will point out you are doing it wrong"
He’s lucky to get 1% return on a high yield savings so he lost 1/12 = .08%/month so if it takes two months for a refund he lost $16.66 in interest from where he has it parked. My bank’s high yield interest only returns .05% so if I had acted stupidly and made the same mistake I would have missed out on 83 cents for the two months.
So he’s lucky it’s not a very expensive mistake.
To match inflation, all one has to do is to buy nonperishable components of the CPI: fuel, real estate (through a REIT), food, commodities, and so on.
If banking can't keep up with that, it speaks volumes about the competence of the financial system.
Savings accounts haven’t kept up with inflation for as long as I remember. So anyone with cash has plugged it into stuff other than mma. I think that’s why these Ibonds are so popular now.
I interpreted "refund of the excess purchase" to mean that it is a refund of the whole purchase. If it were a partial refund, they could have just written "refund of the excess".
By adding "purchase", they made it sound to me like there are two categories of purchases (excess and non-excess) and that this purchase belongs to the excess category. That is, I saw "excess" as an adjective that says why the refund is happening, not how much is being refunded.
The more I analyze the wording, the less I'm sure which interpretation is right.
The last statement of the post mentions how he will not get any return. But he's only going to be refunded the excess.
So ultimately, did he, or will he still make his $850, as initially intended?
She didn’t have a completely incorrect mental model. But the credit card company is being a lot more lenient than the government is being and the government should be more strict.
Edit: I went back to double check that I hadn't replied more times than I realized or something. Nope, 3 whole comments explaining how I thought it might work out. That's if you count the first one where I honestly didn't understand how the author came to the conclusion they should input another $10k.
When my kid was born I was given a convenient form to fill out that registered my child’s birth, applied for a SIN, applied for the relevant tax breaks, and registered me to be contacted about options for saving for my child’s education.
My city has a nice little online portal where I can see my tax and utility bills, register city maintenance issues, apply for local city programs, etc. It’s pretty decent.
Oh, and the CRA’s NETFILE system is pretty neat. In addition to the expected submitting of taxes online, banks, employers, etc can send documents to netfile which my tax software can automatically retrieve and ingest.
Not saying that any of the above are perfect, but government can (and does sometimes) produce decent systems. Of course, there are always bad parts - I’ve recently had friend and family deal with immigration and death systems that badly need a redesign.
Story: when my parents got married, my mother gained Swiss citizenship and they wanted her birth certificate. She told them she didn't have it and that it might not exist anymore, since she was born in South Vietnam, which was no longer a country. They had their colleagues in Vietnam find it for her, and even gave her a copy, without being asked.
I do feel like I benefit greatly from these systems, convoluted though they may be. The goal still is to help people.
The few times I got the short end of the stick, I managed to reach a human the same day.
It can't happen -- I-bonds have a composite rate floor of 0%.
In any case, both hardware and software keyloggers exist which would be thwarted by an onscreen keyboard. If I recall correctly, mouse keyboards became popular when keyloggers started being more known, and the following generation of malware took screenshots every time you clicked.
It’s a very obsolete security measure but did make sense briefly.
The order won’t actually matter here - but even if it did, the “right” thing will happen either way depending on which interpretation of the email you have.
The third transaction got the same response as the second. Which would actually imply that the common reading of that email (he’s getting $25 back from the second deposit is correct, and he’s going to get the entire $9,975 back from the third.)
totalReceived = totalReceived + transactionAmount
if (totalReceived > 10000) {
sendEmail()
wait10weeks()
refund(transactionAmount)
totalReceived = totalReceived - transactionAmount
} else {
buybonds(transactionAmount)
}
A horrible way to write a system of course but if the system takes 10 weeks to process a refund then it doesn't sound like the system is that great to begin with
Yes I know, how do you tell someone where you work without telling them where you work.
Why is the government's solution so much crappier? Why can a private company streamline a web experience much better?
Yes, if you have a Social Security Number and meet any one of these three conditions:
- United States citizen, whether you live in the U.S. or abroad
- United States resident
- Civilian employee of the United States, no matter where you liveLike, this brand of "security" is being persisted with, in 2022, when virtually nothing else uses this sort of approach, and the writing's been on the wall for so long you almost can't see the wall for the writing anymore. And yet.
At the end of the day from an actual-security standpoint there's a lot to be said for generally rooting this kind of thing out and doing away with it, but given the direct association to vaults and banks and government (and probably military) systems and whatnot it's one situation where the blowback might genuinely cause enough bad press to require a summary firing or two as a token of reassurance to the type of old-world mindset in charge of this sort of thing. Maybe.
*shrug* that's a worst-case-scenario imagining what might happen, at least. I honestly have no idea. I just get strong "swim away!!" vibes from it, heh
One of those "Things programmers believe about malware" articles needs to be written. There's a lot of "Schrödinger's cat"-level thinking going on, wherein malware is both running with full rights of the user while ALSO somehow needs to rely on raw keystrokes to record anything.
I would guess approximately no one does this as standard behavior.
His 10k bonds should be there, they will refund the excess, not the whole thing
The author's reading comprehension may leave something to be desired, but so does the interface they were using.
I don't know about that. My minority, immigrant, non-English speaking grandparents and their siblings (several are still alive and in their 90's) all own their homes and are still collecting pensions from their blue-collar private sector jobs. Some of them worked in factories sewing ladies undergarments, purses, and shoes. Some of them worked on road construction crews. And one was a janitor in an office building.
The majority of people never were in a pension plan, and even now a lot of people in pension plans don't work for that employer a full career, only getting partial payouts.
Currently the main source of retirement funds for most retirees is Social Security. So all those supposed people in wonderful pensions from the 1970s and so on either don't exist or make so little from those pensions that SS still pays more.
Don't assume your local situation is what the majority sees.
"By yearend 1977, total employer contributions to defined benefit pension plans had risen [...] covering nearly 35 million active employees." [More than half.]
https://www.bls.gov/mlr/1991/12/art3full.pdf
https://www.thebalance.com/the-history-of-the-pension-plan-2...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USPRIV
Add to that, the public sector workers that were (mostly) all pension and you have more than a majority of workers on pension plan during that time period. No one is wearing rose tinted glasses.
Yes, obviously today, pensions have been removed from (almost) all private sector work places and are rapidly disappearing from the public sector too. Everything has been converted to some kind of investment plan; to pump money into to Wall Street. And we saw how great these investment plans worked out for the poor folks that had planned to retire around 2008.
I’m utterly convinced FANNG comp is overvalued due to selection bias on Blind and direct PR efforts by those companies.
Thats not meant to throw shade on warehouse workers as “lesser”. My dad is retired factory worker.
If you’re young and don’t have family/debt you can just use your ira as an emergency fund. If you have a family and kids you need cash available for unexpected events. Most people don’t have tech jobs where they make 5k every two weeks. A car accident with no emergency fund means many people can’t get to work, lose their job, etc. They need safe cash for emergencies.
More specifically, I have a HELOC and I’m always getting low and no interest balance transfer options from my bank.
Almost nobody has this. The r/personalfinance memes exist largely as "the very basics for people who don't have the first idea how to plan for their financial future."
This is just another one of those benefits of being wealthy. On average, self-insuring saves money. But for a lot of people an emergency fund is a critical thing because they don't have access to liquid assets without gargantuan 401k penalties.
Even then my focus was to always be employable and to be able to find a job quickly.
The first one is books. Go to a book shop, and find a book on personal finances, written by a registered financial advisor in your country, for your country. It'll be long, stuffy, boring as fuck, but you'll likely come away well informed. I think if you're reading HN this would suit.
Second one is personal financial advisers. You want to talk to an independant one, who's not tied to a company that's actually selling financial products. They shouldn't be paid a percentage commision (also called trailhead) on your money - I never understood how somebody can be 'acting in your best interests' if they're paid by how you invest. You should pay them by their time, like you would a doctor. Except it'll cost like $200
You also want a personalised financial adviser. Some advisors say like the one you'd find it you went to a bank, or a mortgage shop have a limited scope - they're only allowed to give advice about the bank's products, or mortgages specifically. You want full picture. Sometimes employee assistance programmes if you have that will actually get you a few free sessions with an adviser, use them.
I looked into this a couple of months ago. It turns out it costs minimum ~$2,000 here in Australia to get anything that's not "General Advice only".
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5eb4889e5e47b4255c410...
I don't know where you could possibly get high-quality, personalized financial advice (with fiduciary standard) for 200. From my experience it's more likely it's on the order of thousands of dollars.
Except there were over 90 million workers by then [1]. The FRED series you picked is not all employed people.
> And we saw how great these investment plans worked out for the poor folks that had planned to retire around 2008.
Ah, cherry picking, the best of all logical fallacies.
It's already known that those pensions didn't turn out too well either, since most of the people in that time now get most of their retirement income from Social Security.....
>to pump money into to Wall Street
And now the bias shows. Why not own some productive assets? What do you think pension plans do with money? Sit on it in a safe? Invest them all in the employing company, increasing risk, so that when/if the parent company fails the people get screwed? (Which happens and still happens a lot).
I don't appreciate your tone here. Everything I posted was the result of a quick web search. It just so happened that the FRED data I found corroborated the numbers in the study I found. Maybe you missed it, but both the study and FRED data are specifically about private sector workers.
Here is some more data (not hidden behind a paywall like your study):
https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet
It looks like at the end of 1977 there was 85M people employed (total) in the US. Which is certainly not "moving above the 90-million mark" as your page suggests. So maybe your data is cherry picked? Is your data even US data? The page you provided doesn't say.
> It's already known that those pensions didn't turn out too well either
You didn't back this up with anything. Private pensions are protected by ERISA that was passed in 1974. It requires employers to have separate assets to cover their pensions and created the PBGC which insures them. The only pensions that I've seen go belly up are state (Kentucky) pensions where the state governments (not beholden to ERISA) raided the pension funds for other things.
> Why not own some productive assets?
If by "productive assets" you mean real estate, the price to play is way too high. And on a moral note, allowing family homes to be commoditizated into investment vehicles for the rich is part of the problem. If, instead, "productive assets" is just your fancy way of saying stocks and their derivatives then yeah; I'm invested in the market. I'm not happy about it, but there isn't another choice.
> And now the bias shows.
Yes I'm biased. Fuck Wall Street. It has nothing to do with "investing in companies". It's all about wealth extraction (from companies and now from dumb money). It produces nothing of value.
It's so much more fun to pretend that everything good that's happened to you, you earned and deserved, rather than a lot of it just being random noise that compounded in the fortunate direction.
https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/the-fundamental-attribution...
It's hard to define just how much luck would matter in any given situation, but if you consider every aspect of our lives as part of luck, which I think is what people mean when they debate luck vs hard work, then I think it's a lot higher than 5% actually. That is, things like place/time of birth, parents, family, socioeconomic status at birth, schools, friends, teachers, health, timing of things, chance encounters - these things are all mostly outside of your control.
Someone on hacker news might be thinking how they worked hard for years to learn software engineering, spent time networking, practiced interview questions, applied to several places, performed well in the interviews, and landed a lucrative job. And that's all part of hard work and it's often a necessary part of success. It doesn't feel like you lucked into anything. But the lucky part was mostly all the stuff I mentioned before - things that happened at birth, or things that happened because of others' actions. If you're born an affluent white American, for example, your luck meter is highly filled from the start. Then maybe at some point you had a teacher that helped you in a meaningful way, or you met a friend that influenced your decision making. And let's not forget there are people who are just as qualified, who study hard, practice, do all the same things, and they don't get the job. Maybe because the interviewer had a hangover, or maybe it was just someone else got in before them and wowed the interview team and made up their mind before seeing them. That's luck.
I believe this is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I&vl=en
It's not luck being born without birth defects, being healthy, and still being alive to this day?
They are so burdened with looking out for themselves they only see caring about anyone else as just another burden that they shouldn't have to bear, instead of seeing it as an avenue of shared and thus relieved burden.
So, any excuse to make it so they don't have to care about any other misfortune than their own.
I’ve often wondered why some people can be so harsh towards those who’ve had something unfortunate happen to them. This makes a lot of sense.
If people did not care, they wouldn’t read and comment, would they? We can observe there is enough attention and salience for this other person’s situation to achieve some level of “care” in other people’s minds. Maybe the caring involved is a more distant and superficial sort? Maybe it is the kind of caring that comes out of avoiding one’s own cares.
I use this thought personally to observe when I care enough to type in a comment, and which of my own cares I am avoiding when I do so.
I didn't provide enough context to illustrate that my point was about selfishness and avoiding feelings of obligation or guilt?
I am not immune myself even though I levelled the charge. I only get through the day by generous application of denial.
If I can't avoid seeing someone hungry, then plan B is figure out a way to conclude that it is within their own power to feed themselves, and so not my problem.
Failing both of those, then I have to deal with it. I either have to share my food with them or I have to consciously decide I'm ok with keeping mine and ignore their misfortune.
Obviously, intellectually, academically, I know that the world is one big continuous stream of unbelievable tragedy, and I can't actually live even one second for myself if I were to try to treat all of that the same way I do when my own partner suffers so much as a headache. So I don't. I pretend everything is fine by arranging things so that mostly everything I see is fine, and when I see something else I mostly rationalize some sway to ignore it. I drive right by that guy standing at the intersection with the sign, etc.
I just at least try to be self aware that I'm doing that and not confuse a sanity/survival strategy, however justified and necessary, for reality.
I'm saying that a lot of people don't seem to do even that last little part.
If you don't mind getting analytical, what about today, in your life, is different about today than other days? Just curious. My day has been the same as others, good sleep, waking up easily, tasks in line for the day, no coffee, so I am willing to assume something about your life patterns today is bringing you under my nose.
Very sloppy for a consumer financial communication, but I guess that governments can get away with it.
But anyway it just shows more UX issues - if it's the former then why didn't the balance update to show $10k; in either case why does it accept the payment before checking? It should just say no you've hit your limit this year, or you've already subscribed $25 this year you're limit is $9975.
So it is not real time system, but likely processed weekly, monthly or like. And all of the messes are bunched up and processed for single out come for period of time.
User was just stupid not to wait a week before next attempt...
But I don't see why you can't just record '25' even if it won't settle for days/weeks, and not allow >$9975 in the meantime. (If the $25 doesn't go through then fine, you just end up with $25 capacity still.)
I bet it allows you to make a single >$10k payment only to reject it (on an 8-10week time frame) if it behaves like this.
If they waited a week they wouldn’t get the 8.5% (I believe)
I'm 90% sure the author will end up with a $25 bond. There's a 10% chance it won't actually cancel the $9975 purchase, due to races between the probably bolted on email part and the thing that reconciles all the transactions by scanning their (emulated?) tape drive at night.
Either way, it's pretty clearly a bug in the server implementation (unless this behavior is accidentally required by law, which wouldn't surprise me either...)
I rationalize my choice of inaction when I feel obligation or guilt to take action. I am unable to observe the interior rationalizations of others' inaction.
Moving into the US - or being born there - really doesn't make you successful, you'll find yourself grinding daily if you want some success. Actually, you may find it's much harder for you there than elsewhere (where you might find less outrageous success, but with much less hard work).
> It's not luck being born without birth defects, being healthy, and still being alive to this day?
Exactly, that's modern medicine - thank scientists, doctors, engineers and insurance bankers for their hard work. Gods and fate have zero part in it.